—and as crushing as that is to my massive ego, I can certainly understand and would not suggest for a minute that I have hung off the words of every other person in a filibuster. However, I think that's fairly accurate. The Toronto Star is the most widely circulated daily newspaper in the country.
This is dated actually three days before the Globe editorial. The Globeweighed in on March 31, and this is on Tuesday, so the Star was moving pretty quickly. You have to love it, though. Even when you get criticized, you get a great picture. It's hard to beat that. Anyway, the headline of the Toronto Star editorial as it relates to the matter before us, Chair, is “Potential parliamentary reforms would strike a blow to democracy: Editorial”. This is on Tuesday, to their credit, the day before the budget.
The Toronto Star editorial board said this on Tuesday, March 28, 2017:
The mess of democracy is easy to love when you're in opposition and your job is to hold the government to account. But for those in power trying to push through an agenda, robust democratic institutions—a working Parliament, for instance, or watchdogs with teeth—are too often seen as a nuisance.
So it wasn't just those wild-eyed radicals over at The Globe and Mail editorial board who think that the Prime Minister sees all of this as merely a nuisance. It would seem that the Toronto Star editorial board also feels that Mr. Trudeau views Parliament and its workings as a nuisance.
Isn't that interesting? This suggests that The Globe and Mail felt that, no matter how much it probably—and I don't know anything about this world, so I'm totally speculating, but I suspect, when you're doing the same subject and you're a main competitor, you might want to try to avoid using the same language or the same phraseology just for obvious reasons as competitors, and so one would think that editorial board was at least familiar with what its colleagues and counterparts at The Globe and Mail had said and would have noticed that they used the word “nuisance” to describe how they believe the Prime Ministerviewed Parliament and its committees. And yet they still used the word “nuisance.”
Now, I could be making a mountain out of a molehill. I accept that. But it just seems passing strange to me that The Globe and Mail.... I guess it would be the other way around, wouldn't it? The Globe and Mail would have seen this in the Toronto Star because it was first, and then The Globe and Mail still felt that of all the words available, “nuisance” was still the right word, that it was the accurate word, and, therefore, even though it was repeating a word that its competitor had used, it was accurate and so it felt comfortable using it.
But the original use, at least between these two, was the Toronto Star editorial that came out on the Tuesday and said its impression was that this is how the Prime Minister views Parliament.
I caution my Conservative friends: You're not going to like the next part, so do up your seatbelts and get your head down.
The Harper government was famously attuned to this tension, putting expediency ahead of democracy at every turn. In opposition, Justin Trudeau was an outspoken critic of Stephen Harper’s autocratic tendencies. He tapped into growing public concern about the health of our democracy, promising open government and a post-partisan approach to Parliament.